Samsung’s ultrasonic case is like a guide dog in your smartphone

Samsung also introduces a book scanning stand so your smartphone can read to you.

Samsung has announced a series of accessories to help people with disabilities get more out of their smartphones. All the accessories are for the Galaxy Core Advance, a fairly new midrange device that runs Android 4.2 on a 1.2Ghz Krait dual-core processor with a 4.7-inch, 480p screen.

The first of the accessibility accessories is the "Ultrasonic cover"—a massive case for the Core Advance that "allows users to detect obstacles and navigate unfamiliar places" by vibrating or speaking when you're about to bump into something. It's almost like having sonarin your phone. By holding the phone out in front, the device can help a visually impaired person detect an object up to two meters away. Traditionally, this is done with a walking stick or guide dog.

Next up is the Optical Scan Stand, which is a large stand that turns the Core Advance camera into a text scanner. When paper is placed under the camera, an OCR app kicks in and starts reading the text aloud through a text-to-speech engine. Samsung is also introducing "Voice Label" which appears to just be NFC tags that trigger voice notes. While these aren't quite the innovative new smartphone features most users are looking for, it's nice to see Samsung try something new that could help a person with visual impairments.

The scan-and-read deal seems pretty practical since that's more for people who would normally use reading glasses, but I have trouble understanding the sonar part. If they're blind enough that they can't see physical objects in front of them, what use is a smart phone that has no tactile feedback to operate it? Or can you operate everything on it by voice?

My friends mom suffers from macular degeneration that a course of antibiotics made a lot worse and now she is legally blind. For her if the reader works well, that would be great. Be nice to be able to demo it somewhere.

"How will blind people operate the touch screen of the phone to use the app?"

Blind people already use touch screens on phones. Android comes with a built in screen reader called TalkBack. It slightly changes the phone's controls so that as you move your finger around the screen, it will announce what it is that you are touching. To activate an item, you can double tap it. The iPhone has a similar feature called Voice Over. For more information about TalkBack and other accessibility services on Android, see http://developer.android.com/design/pat ... ility.html.

The (often white) walking stick that blind people use is called a cane.

This would serve as an addition to a cane or guide dog, but it couldn't replace it:-While it may be able to find obstacles in front of you, it still has to communicate exactly how wide they are, and exactly how far away they are. While there are ways to do this, most of them involve augmentation using sound, meaning that headphones would be pretty much a necessity (both to accurately communicate information, and to prevent the system from becoming annoying to people around the blind person). Asking a blind person to wear headphones in a new/busy environment poses several mobility and social challenges.-The larger concern that I have is that both canes and guide dogs allow blind people to find changes in elevation (such as steps, curbs, etc). That would be extremely dangerous if a blind person tried to rely on this device exclusively in an unknown environment. That's why I think it could serve in addition to a cane or guide dog, but then its usefulness is in question.-Third, a guide dog allows a blind person to do something else that neither a cane nor this device assists with. Guide dogs are trained to recognize objects and points-of-interest in the environment. It is possible to tell a guide dog to "find the door," and it will lead the blind handler to the nearest door. That command extends to almost anything that a handler or trainer wants to teach the dog, such as chairs, elevators, stares, etc. For more information about the responsibilities of a blind handler and their guide dog, check out this blog entry titled "Responsibility: How Does Your Guide Dog Know When to Cross the Street": http://blog.seanmealin.net/posts/2014/0 ... he-street/

I imagine this is no substitute for a guide dog, but I'd expect with a good vibration unit in the phone in combination with a cane a blind person would be able to get around reasonably well. Guide dogs aren't cheap to train, so if it provides assistance for people who don't qualify for one (due to vision that isn't degraded quite far enough) then I still see this as pretty valuable.

Perhaps this could, in the future, be integrated into a robotic guide dog that would reduce the otherwise exorbitant costs of a guide dog (most blind dog seekers get them for free, but training costs are actually over $40,000). However, the robot dog is not going to be much company

Did blind people actually play a lead role in developing these devices? I find this hard to believe, looking at these devices.

I'm sick of seeing non-disabled people get money thrown at them to develop sub-standard shit for disabled people. Hello, there's plenty of us disabled people who know perfectly well what we want, but do we get the dev funding for projects like this? Fuck no.

It's amazing the number of well-paid non-disabled teams working in the disability sector who have at best a junior disabled member or a couple of disabled volunteers who get a pat on the head and token payment made to them.

I'm fed up with disability sector funding generally meaning giving disability money to non-disabled people to perpetuate existing career structures that act to exclude disabled people from taking a lead role in their own disability sector.

Hey Samsung, I have this disability where I, um, can't type on a touch screen.

can't tell if you're joking or if you're like me in that you prefer a real, physical keyboard. i'm about to buy a samsung galaxy s relay since that seems to be the phone with the best specs that has a slider keyboard and isn't a cdma phone. too bad the relay was released in 2012.

I always thought if you had really accurate GPS in a phone it might be possible to use the vibration as a haptic feedback. So like you could give a blind person, or anyone, directions and a virtual path could guide them and keep them on track by vibrating harder as they strayed off it.

I always thought if you had really accurate GPS in a phone it might be possible to use the vibration as a haptic feedback. So like you could give a blind person, or anyone, directions and a virtual path could guide them and keep them on track by vibrating harder as they strayed off it.

That would only keep them on the path, not tell them about the massive 5 foot ditch created by a backhoe on the path (or the presence of the parked, non operating backhoe itself).

Skulls make a funny sound when running into things at walking speed, and bodies tend to do the same when dropped into deep holes.

Did blind people actually play a lead role in developing these devices? I find this hard to believe, looking at these devices.

I'm sick of seeing non-disabled people get money thrown at them to develop sub-standard shit for disabled people. Hello, there's plenty of us disabled people who know perfectly well what we want, but do we get the dev funding for projects like this? Fuck no.

It's amazing the number of well-paid non-disabled teams working in the disability sector who have at best a junior disabled member or a couple of disabled volunteers who get a pat on the head and token payment made to them.

I'm fed up with disability sector funding generally meaning giving disability money to non-disabled people to perpetuate existing career structures that act to exclude disabled people from taking a lead role in their own disability sector.

/rant

As the partner of someone who is blind, I can see your points, but at the same time I do have to call out some major hurdles:- There are more sighted people than blind people, that's just a fact of life- Just because someone does not have a disability does not mean they can produce solutions for said disability, quite often they can, and do- Part of the reason why this happens is because there is a market for this technology that someone who has the disability has not tapped into, not sought out funding for, not patented.- And a big part of the reason for THAT is there are few qualified blind individuals in Technology. The few blind technologists I have personally met through my Partner are quite quickly dismissed as know-nothings within 5 minutes, not possessing any sort of certification or formal training.- And, finally, the NFB itself is a big hindrance to the visually impaired community. I could rant a long, long time about this, but the NFB is actually one of the most poorly operated organizations I have ever seen. The amount of self-serving egotism is astounding, as is the treatment the NFB gives to it's own constituents when they do not adhere to the specific teachings of the NFB. Like I said, I could go on forever about the problems with the NFB and NFB related organizations... it is quite literally a cesspool. Employment for the blind would be significantly higher if the NFB spent a little less money suing everyone and more money on outreach and public education, more money on helping small businesses cover the costs of providing accessible tech, more on working closely with Universities to develop and market Accessible tech courses, with Accessible Tech certifications and degree programs.

Point being, someone has to make these products, and if someone who is blind doesn't do it, a company seeking to enter that market will. Either way, the community is served.

Hey Samsung, I have this disability where I, um, can't type on a touch screen.

can't tell if you're joking or if you're like me in that you prefer a real, physical keyboard. i'm about to buy a samsung galaxy s relay since that seems to be the phone with the best specs that has a slider keyboard and isn't a cdma phone. too bad the relay was released in 2012.

Both, I guess. I just see this kind of accessory created and it makes me think they could make a keyboard case for the S5. I can dream.

Did blind people actually play a lead role in developing these devices? I find this hard to believe, looking at these devices.

I'm sick of seeing non-disabled people get money thrown at them to develop sub-standard shit for disabled people. Hello, there's plenty of us disabled people who know perfectly well what we want, but do we get the dev funding for projects like this? Fuck no.

It's amazing the number of well-paid non-disabled teams working in the disability sector who have at best a junior disabled member or a couple of disabled volunteers who get a pat on the head and token payment made to them.

I'm fed up with disability sector funding generally meaning giving disability money to non-disabled people to perpetuate existing career structures that act to exclude disabled people from taking a lead role in their own disability sector.

/rant

Would you care to describe what makes these devices "substandard"? Hopefully that will help improve them.

Personally I think they need to develop a tactile feedback glove, or other sort of wearable, or combination of the two, that measures the environment and relays that information back to the user in the form of distinctly identifiable sensations. Something so that you could "feel" objects with your sensors, and learn pertinent information such as distance, temperature, etc.

Speaking of that... Wouldn't it be AWESOME to have an Oculus Rift and a wearable suit sort of like what I mention above, and then in games have extra senses? Maybe an example of this could include concentrating on a particular object, and sensing it's general location and elevation relative to you. Or in a Spider-Man game, imagine actually having Spidey's spider sense!

While this is being billed for people with disabilities, that is not really the case (pun intended) at all. This is about increasing phone use while walking and doing so a bit more safely... less wandering into traffic or walking into closed doors (stuff I see everyday on campus). It also brings new capabilities for multitasking since you can now read on demand while doing something else. I love it.

Ron Amadeo / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.